Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: A former Mousketeer, Johnny Crawford is best remembered for playing young Mark McCain on The Rifleman (1958-1963). His career slowed after he reached adulthood when he was relegated to supporting roles.

Trivia: American actor Morris Ankrum graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree, then went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he founded a collegiate little theatre, eventually turning his hobby into a vocation as a teacher and director at the Pasadena Playhouse. (He was much admired by his students, including such future luminaries as Robert Preston and Raymond Burr.) Having already changed his name from Nussbaum to Ankrum for professional reasons, Ankrum was compelled to undergo another name change when he signed a Paramount Pictures contract in the 1930s; in his first films, he was billing as Stephen Morris. Reverting to Morris Ankrum in 1939, the sharp-featured, heavily eyebrowed actor flourished in strong character roles, usually of a villainous nature, throughout the 1940s. By the 1950s, Ankrum had more or less settled into "authority" roles in science-fiction films and TV programs. Among his best known credits in this genre were Rocketship X-M (1950), Red Planet Mars (1952), Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953) (do we detect a subtle pattern here?), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). The fact that Morris Ankrum played innumerable Army generals was fondly invoked in director Joe Dante's 1993 comedy Matinee: the military officer played by Kevin McCarthy in the film-within-a-film Mant is named General Ankrum.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).